Happy Friday, friends 👋

When news broke earlier this week that Egyptian quick commerce startup Rabbit was finally making its hop over to The Kingdom, I knew I had to sit down with CEO Ahmad Yousry to dig into it — why now, why Saudi, and why Rabbit thinks it can win in a market where players like Jahez, Ninja, Nana, Hungerstation, and Keeta are already entrenched and fighting tooth and nail for market share.

We’re biased, but we think it’s well worth your time. Read the full interview here.

Enjoy this week’s edition read! 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

• 🐰 EXCLUSIVE Interview: Inside Rabbit’s Saudi expansion with CEO Ahmad Yousry

• 🤝 Saudi’s Sary and Bangladesh’s ShopUp merge to launch SILQ, a B2B commerce platform, with $110M in fresh funding

• 📱Pakistan supply chain fintech Haball secures $52 million pre-Series A to expand to Saudi & GCC

• 💸 Maseera acquires Egypt’s ADVA to power North Africa fintech expansion

In partnership with MYNE

Gain financial clarity, control, and security in one powerful app

Introducing MYNE: The UAE-based all-in-one platform for enhancing financial wellbeing.

Whether you're planning your legacy, tracking your net worth in real time, or wanting to manage your budgets with ease, MYNE is here to empower every step of your financial journey.

Download MYNE and take control of your financial finances.

🚀 Startup funding round-up

SILQ (🇸🇦 KSA / 🇧🇩 Bangladesh), a newly merged entity formed by Saudi’s Sary and Bangladesh’s ShopUp, has raised $110 million in funding to build what they claim to be the largest B2B commerce platform across the Gulf and Emerging Asia. The funding includes equity and a financing facility for Silq Financial, its fintech arm, and was led by Sanabil Investments and Valar Ventures, with participation from Qatar Development Bank and others.

Rabbit (🇪🇬 Egypt), a quick commerce company offering 20-minute delivery through dark stores, has expanded into KSA with a new regional HQ in Riyadh, following an undisclosed funding round and amount, from investors including Lorax Capital Partners, Global Ventures, Raed Ventures, Beltone Venture Capital, Global Founders Capital, Goodwater Capital, Hub71, Simple Capital, and Foundation Ventures.

PayTic (🇲🇦 Morocco), a fintech startup automating payment operations for card issuers, has raised $4 million in a round led by AfricInvest, with participation from Build Ventures, Axian Group, Mistral, Island Capital Partner, and Concrete.

Lucidya (🇸🇦 KSA), an AI customer experience management (CXM) platform, has received a $1.3 million government grant from the National Technology Development Program (NTDP) to enhance its AI-powered CX suite and expand across MENA. This follows a $6 million Series B in 2022.

Rentify (🇦🇪 UAE), a proptech and fintech startup digitising rental payments and tenant-landlord interactions, has raised $500,000 from unnamed investors.

STUCK? (🇸🇦 KSA), an AI-powered language intelligence platform offering real-time, culturally nuanced English and Arabic content, has closed a high six-figure pre-Seed round, led by Mena Tech Fund, with backing from the KAUST Innovation Fund and Saudi angel investors.

FeeSolution (🇸🇦 KSA), a digital school payments platform simplifying tuition and activity fees for schools and parents, has raised $300,000 in a pre-Seed round from angel investors.

Sellou (🇧🇭 Bahrain), a social commerce startup offering a video-first marketplace, has raised undisclosed Seed funding at a $3 million valuation.

NodeFoundry (🇦🇪 UAE), a platform powering AI agents through DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks), has secured undisclosed Seed funding from angel investors and BlockchainVelocity.

Premium deep-dive

Building the financial backbone of MENA and beyond ↗

Hubpay’s Kevin Kilty on the long road to fintech infrastructure in MENA, the overlooked power of remittance corridors, why stablecoins are no longer a sideshow – and what it really means to build a business from the trenches of regulatory complexity.

Interview

🐰 Inside Rabbit’s Saudi Expansion

Rabbit’s CEO Ahmad Yousry on localising dark stores, rejecting discount wars, and why winning quick commerce in MENA is a supply chain challenge — not a marketing one.

In 2021, Ahmad Yousry and his co-founders launched Rabbit with a bold claim and the funding to back it: a record-setting $11 million pre-Seed round, the largest ever in MENA at the time.

Before founding Rabbit, Yousry had already seen the inside of two of the region’s most aggressive operators: Talabat Mart, where he led the Egypt rollout, and Uber Eats, where he ran operations until the platform exited the country. Those experiences shaped his perspective on scale – and more importantly, on restraint.

While global quick commerce players like Gorillas and Getir were raising billions, expanding fast, and retreating just as quickly, Rabbit took a different route. It focused on operational discipline, not land grabs. On Egypt first, not everywhere at once.

Fast forward to today: Rabbit is profitable. It has built a loyal customer base, iterated on its infrastructure, and largely tuned out the hype cycle. And now, three years later, it’s making its first move beyond Egypt – launching in The Kingdom with a new regional HQ in Riyadh.

The company isn’t sharing how much capital it just raised – but the investor list speaks volumes: Lorax Capital Partners, Global Ventures, Raed Ventures, Beltone Venture Capital, Global Founders Capital, Goodwater Capital, Hub71, Simple Capital, and Foundation Ventures.

But Saudi is a different kind of challenge — more complex, more fragmented, and still at a nascent stage of online grocery adoption.

I sat down with Ahmad to understand why now, why Saudi, and why Rabbit thinks it can win in a market where players like Jahez, Ninja, and Nana are already entrenched and vying tooth and nail for market share.

What followed was a refreshingly practical look at what it really takes to expand in MENA.

We talked through how Rabbit approached timing and focus, what profitability means in the q-commerce category, and the systems they’ve built to adapt their dark store model to Saudi’s on-the-ground realities.

Ahmad also shared his approach to hiring local, delegating decision-making, building city-by-city without trying to copy-paste from Egypt, and why he believes competition is something to be embraced, not feared.

🤝 Regional entrants

💸 Haball, a Karachi-based fintech founded by Omer bin Ahsan, has raised $52 million in pre-Series A funding to drive its expansion into the GCC, beginning with a Saudi market entry in 2025. The round includes $5 million in equity led by Zayn VC and $47 million in shariah-compliant debt from Meezan Bank, Pakistan’s largest Islamic bank, alongside participation from Saudi private investors. Haball offers supply chain financing and digital invoicing solutions for SMEs and multinationals like Coca-Cola, addressing a critical credit gap in Pakistan’s B2B landscape. With over $3 billion in payments processed and $110 million in financing disbursed, the company now aims to replicate its model in markets like the UAE and Qatar.

⛓️ Blockchain

🌐 Mantra Chain, a blockchain platform focused on tokenised real-world assets, has launched the Mantra Ecosystem Fund, a $108 million investment vehicle aimed at accelerating the adoption of projects within its ecosystem. Over the next four years, Mantra plans to back high-potential blockchain startups through a global network of partners, including Laser Digital, Shorooq, Brevan Howard Digital, and Damac. Founded by John Patrick Mullen, Mantra is positioning itself as a key player in real asset tokenisation, with regulatory backing via a VASP license from Dubai’s VARA. The fund will deploy capital alongside major investors to build out infrastructure for real-world blockchain use cases.

🌾 The Hashgraph Group has made a strategic investment in AgNext Technologies, a UAE-based AgriTech company known for its AI-powered food quality assessment tools and blockchain tracking systems. The deal follows AgNext’s $21 million Series A in 2021, led by Alpha Wave Incubation and backed by ADQ’s DisruptAD, alongside existing investors Omnivore and Kalaari Capital. Founded by Tarunjeet Bhamra, AgNext will now integrate Hedera’s distributed ledger technology to boost transparency and traceability across global food supply chains. The partnership also includes plans for a joint venture in Switzerland to roll out smart, Hedera-powered agri-devices aimed at reducing food waste and strengthening transaction systems in agriculture.

📈 VC

🏦 DisrupTech Ventures has acquired an additional minority stake in Khazna from CIB Egypt in a secondary share transaction advised by EXITS MENA. Khazna, a digital financial services platform focused on underserved communities, raised $16 million in a pre-Series B earlier this year to fuel its expansion into Saudi. DisrupTech, an early backer since Khazna’s seed round in 2020, is doubling down on its bet as the startup positions itself to become one of the region’s first neo-banks.

🚀 Yango Ventures, the new $20 million early-stage fund from Dubai-based Yango Group, has announced its first investment: Luable – MejorCDT, a YC-backed startup building a marketplace for banking deposits in Latin America. Founded during YC’s S21 batch, Luable has raised $1 million from Y Combinator and counts the Harvard University Endowment and Raisin – a $1B+ European deposit platform – as backers. The platform helps consumers and businesses access better deposit products through a transparent, digital-first experience.

🤝 Acquisitions

💳 ADVA, Egypt’s first online service instalment platform, has been acquired by Abu Dhabi-based Maseera Holding, a subsidiary of IHC’s 2PointZero Group, to serve as its technology and data analytics hub for North Africa. Founded in 2020 by former Careem Egypt GM Rania Gaafar, ADVA allows consumers to access short-term credit for essential services like healthcare and education through a buy now, pay later model. The startup previously raised a six-figure seed round from Sawari Ventures.

📆 Events and Opportunities

🇸🇦 SVC has announced The Private Capital Forum 2025, Saudi Arabia's first dedicated platform in Saudi Arabia focused exclusively on private capital. Set in Riyadh, the forum will bring together institutional investors, fund managers, policymakers, and global stakeholders. Over two days, participants will delve into venture capital, private equity, and private debt markets.

🕗 October 22-23, 2025
📍 King Abdullah Financial District Conference Center, Riyadh

📚 What we’re reading

• The slide deck that helped Sarwa raise $15.5M (Sarwa)

• Quona Capital’s lessons from India (Quona)

• Founders fume over Malaysian VC’s term sheet (Tech in Asia)

• How Apple Fumbled Siri’s AI Makeover (The Information)

• Universities should not be greedy with technology spin-offs (FT)

• The rise of AI ‘reasoning’ models is making benchmarking more expensive (Techcrunch)

• Here are the reasons SpaceX won nearly all recent military launch contracts (arsTechnica)